Image segmentation algorithm based on superpixel clustering

Abstract

The main task of image segmentation is to partition an image into disjoint sets of pixels called clusters. Spectral clustering algorithm has been developed rapidly in recent years and it has been widely used in image segmentation. The traditional spectral clustering algorithm requires huge amount of computation to process colour images with high resolution. While one possible solution is reducing image resolution, but it will lead to the loss of image information and reduce segmentation performance. To overcome the problem of traditional spectral clustering, an image segmentation algorithm based on superpixel clustering is proposed. Firstly, the algorithm uses the superpixel preprocessing technique to quickly divide the image into a certain number of superpixel regions with specific information. Then, the similarity matrix is used to provide the input information to the spectral clustering algorithm to cluster the superpixel regions and get the final image segmentation results. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the performance in image segmentation compared with the traditional spectral clustering algorithm, and finally the substantial improvement has been obtained in respect of computational complexity, processing time and the overall segmentation effect.